Previews

Def Jam: Icon

EA Chicago brings the world renowned hip-hop label to the new wave of consoles.

Spiffy:

Visually amazing; could carry on the legacy of the Def Jam series; music integration sounds promising.

Iffy:

Not enough time with the combat system to tell if it's too deep for a five minute demo, or if it needs work.

Topping the bone-snapping, profane, and gritty Def Jam: Fight for NY is no small task. AKI's wrestling/fighting hybrid managed to successfully maintain the precarious balance between street credibility and one of the best wrestling game engines ever created. While critics might not have thrown laurels at its feet, gamers everywhere spoke with their wallets. A version developed by another team would inevitably have some big shoes to fill. For that reason, EA commissioned its Chicago studio, creators of the ultra-successful Fight Night series, another franchise with mainstream and street cred, to bang out the next installment of the Def Jam franchise.

We got a chance to play a brief build at Microsoft's CES booth of Def Jam: Icon. While we played the Xbox 360 version of the game, we haven't received any word at this point that the PS3 version has any dramatic differences from its counterpart. Conceptually, all of the ideas that we'd seen over that past six months, from the detailed characters and raw environments, are all intact. However, one thing that irked us was the brevity of the demo. There was no way to learn and assimilate the game's complex move sets in the five or so minutes that the timed game ran. We had to play it twice just to get the basics down.

Icon's demo, as before, featured ATL residents T.I. and Big Boi duking it out in a gas station in a run down area that strongly resembles either Southwest or East Atlanta, whether anyone at EA will admit it or not. Indeed, the environment is quite destructible and prone to environmental hazards. The face buttons, unmodified, function for punches and kicks, both high and low. Grappling is relegated to the right stick and can be used for tossing an opponent into the stage's myriad dangers.

The triggers are used to modify the controls. By holding down the right trigger, players block, or with a well-timed tap of the right stick, reverse any melee attacks. When players use the left trigger, however, things can dramatically change. Since the environments move and quiver according to the basslines, music is at the root of the fighting engine. By setting up the DJ function, the combat takes a remarkably different direction. With the turntable motion, which resembles something straight out of a music video, one fighter can double the damage against an opponent. On the stage that EA has been demoing for some time, the gas mains will explode with a few scratching gestures and send a combatant sky high.

With those functions, players will be able to tear one another to pieces. Also, we know that the game has software that brings the algorhythms of music files into play. That means that anything from Nas' "Illmatic" album to Frank Sinatra's greatest hits can be used to beat the unholy crap out of someone. It's something that we haven't been able to test or see in action quite yet, however. Also, we're hoping to play and see a more advanced build in the next few weeks; we're still not completely sold on the fighting mechanic, in part because we can't judge its depth when the demo reset every five minutes.

Whether it's too deep to comprehend without more face time, or it's in need of some fine tuning, we can't tell, and frankly, a CES showroom floor surrounded by 150,000 people is probably a poor place to make that judgment on a game like this. Needless to say, we should be seeing a more updated build of Def Jam: Icon at some point in the next few weeks, and rest assured, we'll have a stronger take on it at that point.